Developer Update 04.13.2015

As most of you know we experienced some down time with the Peace Server yesterday and today. This was caused by data corruption that occurred when the server was disconnected abruptly from the Steam server system which is now required to run the game servers. Normally a disconnection from the Steam servers would not cause too many problems but this happened right during a data backup, interrupted the backup and caused faulty data to be saved.

Today, Steam was updated with a patch including the following notice:

NOTE: this update was re-released on 4/13 to address a crash which affected dedicated servers for some multi-player games.

An update has been released for the Steam Client and will be automatically downloaded.

So that's the root cause of the server going down so unexpectedly.

The down time was primarily due to waiting to make sure that data was restored properly without any roll back in actions, construction or skill gains. This was a time consuming process, but it turned out successful!

I want to thank all of you players for your patience, assistance and honesty!

There were some issues that could have been taken advantage of by players, but players instead chose to protect each other's property in a very impressive display!

I will shut down both servers for maintenance this week for brief periods to ensure that the new Steam patch is functioning correctly. Maintenance will run at usual times (1:00 AM PST) and last for 30 minutes to an hour.

In case something like this happens again in the future, I've taken steps to prevent the same type of errors from occurring.

- The data backup functions will now have some more error checking to prevent redundant loops. This will be part of the next public patch.

- Remote backups will happen more frequently.

- In case the server crashes due to a Steam disconnect, I have a list of steps I will now take to ensure data integrity before restarting the server. My haste to get the server back up yesterday caused the panic as corrupted data was loaded.